Innholdsfortegnelse for 27-Dec-20 i Business Today

Knives — and wallets — are out in full measure as three of the world’s richest businesses vie for supremacy of India’s $850 billion retail market, an industry that is projected to present an even greater business opportunity of $1.3 trillion as soon as 2025. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail, Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Inc. and the Walton family’s Walmart-Flipkart combo are pitching themselves for the long haul in Indian retail. With $33.3 billion (₹2.46 lakh crore) already invested, they are digging into their deep pockets to ready an arsenal that will endure a multi-year battle for leadership. And the Tatas — one of India’s oldest business houses and among the most conservative — have also thrown their hat into the ring by bidding for India’s biggest grocery retailer Big Basket. With…

Reliance Retail Revenues: ₹1,62,936 crore EBITDA: ₹9,654 crore PAT: ₹5,448 crore Valuation: $4.2 lakh crore BRICK & MORTAR No. of stores: 12,000 Presence: 6,700 cities Retail Area: 28.7 million sq.ft. E-COMMERCE Jiomart.com Ajio.com Traditional Kirana Stores: 1,00,000 Jiomart.com Ajio.com Traditional Kirana Stores: 1,00,000 ₹47,265 crore from PE investors such as Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Silver Lake, General Atlantic, Mubadala, GIC, TPG and ADIA Facebook's $5.7 billion investment in Jio will help the retail business's multi-platform strategy. Google has invested $4.5 billion in Reliance Jio INVESTMENTS ₹2,917 crore investment in Hamleys, Urban Ladder, Zivame, Fynd and Netmeds If Reliance wins legal battle for Future Group, it will invest ₹24,713 crore Amazon India *Amazon Seller Services and Amazon Internet Services Ltd data for FY2019 ECOMMERCE Revenue: ₹10,333,7 crore EBITDA: (₹-4,363 crore) PAT:…

UTTAR PRADESH 1. Agra Leather 2. Aligarh Lock and Hardware 3. Allahabad Moonj Products 4. Ambedkar Nagar Textile Products 5. Amethi Moonj Products 6. Amroha Musical Instrument (Dholak) 7. Auraiya Food Processing (Desi Ghee) 8. Azamgarh Black Clay Pottery 9. Budaun Zari-Zardozi 10. Baghpath Home Furnishings 11. Bahraich Crafts (Wheat Stalk) 12. Ballia Bindi 13. Balrampur Food Processing (Pulses) 14. Banda ShazarStone 15. Barabanki Textile Product (Stole) 16. Bareilly Zari-Zardozi 17. Basti Wood Craft 18. Bhadoi Carpet 19. Bijnor Wood Craft 20. Bulandshahar Pottery 21. Chandauli Zari-Zardozi 22. Chitrakoot Wooden Toys 23. Deoria Decorative Product 24. Etawah Textile Products 25. Etah Faizabad Ghungroo Ghanti (Brass Bell) Jaggery 27. Farrukhabad Block Printing 28. Fatehpur Bed Sheets 29. Firozabad Glass Ware 30. Gautam Budh Nagar Readymade Garments 31. Ghazipur Wall Hanging 32.…

(Joe Biden) won because the election was rigged…” A tweet from US President Donald Trump on November 15 was his first acknowledgement that he has lost the presidential elections. The same day, something symbolically significant happened in another corner of the world. Fifteen countries, mostly Asian, signed the world's biggest free trade pact, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement, which covers 30 per cent of the global economy. Trump has been an advocate of trade protectionism. He started a major trade war with China and, to a lesser extent, with other countries, including India. One of his first decisions after taking charge in 2016 was pulling the US out of what could have been the world’s largest free trade agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which represented 40 per cent…

Anand Agarwal loves to hack into things. The CEO of STL is a curiously enthusiastic geek. His hobby is to disrupt things, and then build, repair and reboot them. Often one can find him surrounded with unassembled audio systems, laptops and all kinds of digital devices. A PhD in material sciences, he is an electronics and network enthusiast at heart. “I love to get inside the hood of things and then to change them to my liking,” says Agarwal. “The feeling of being able to break things apart, fix them and put them back together is immensely satisfying. It keeps the student in you alive, and we are always learning, aren’t we?” It is with the same eagerness that he drives STL to reinvent digital networks with open-source radio and…

THE FOUNDATION OF THE THE INDIRA IVF EMPIRE WAS IDEALLY LAID THEN. Just 10 years later, in 1988, Dr Murdia founded the country's first sperm bank and Indira Infertility Clinic & Research Centre (IICRC), a basic fertility treatment centre in Udaipur. Fast-forward to 2011, his sons Nitiz Murdia and Dr. Kshitiz Murdia came together to co-found Indira IVF. This bandied to together a host of services dealing with infertility, under one roof. Pune played host to the second Indira IVF centre 2014. Since then, in just a span of 6 years, Indira IVF has grown from strength to strength, boasting of 93 centres throughout the country today. When the two Murdia brothers began their entrepreneurial journey, they were met with one major obstacle - a very low awareness of infertility…

"Oriflame India, entered the Indian market in 1995. Buoyant at the company's 25 years of achievements in empowering millions of lives with beauty and wellness, Mr. Naveen Anand, Senior Director Regional Marketing South Asia shares with BT the high optimism with which the company views its future journey of doing business. A gala digital celebration shall mark Oriflame's landmark moment." Oriflame is celebrating it's 25 years in India. How would you sum up the journey? Celebrating 25 exciting years in India is truly a proud moment for Oriflame, which was amongst the first few companies to establish business when the Government of India allowed FDI ushering in a whole new global perspective to building economies. Oriflame was also the founding members of Indian Direct Selling Association for our industry to…

With the takeover of power in Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had issued directives to the State's officials to prepare comprehensive plans for not only protecting and preserving UP's unique arts and crafts but also for their sustained promotion. Under this vision of Yogi, the unique and ambitious 11One-District-One Product" project has come into being. This has not only made available new markets for the State's exquisite products but has also provided new dimensions to the promotion of the traditional craftsmen as well as MSME units in the State. The doubling of the production and export of ODOP products in five years through revolutionary changes in the State's handicrafts industry is showing results of Yogi's efforts to make UP a onetrillion economy. The Lal Road locality near Bijli Ghar…

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared lockdown in the country on March 24 to check the spread of COVID-19, UP had only King George Medical College (KGMC), Lucknow, with the capacity to conduct 200 Corona tests in a day. One day before this, only 72 tests had been done in the KGMC lab. Benares Hindu University (BHU) had facility only to screen COVID-19 cases. As the pandemic spread, a total of 5,000 Corona tests in a day began to be done at the Sanjay Gandhi PostGraduate Institute (SGPGI), Lucknow, Meerut Medical College, Saifai Village Medical Institute, Gorakhpur and Jhansi medical colleges, besides, the Central Government's lab, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Benares Hindu University (BHU) and Lucknow's command hospital within two weeks of the start of lockdown. Seven months on, UP…

Sonal Agrawal, Managing Partner, Accord Group India, was born in East Africa where her earliest memories are of elephant herds on safari. They have since remained a constant theme in her life — the wooden lamp, the pen holder and a bell on her table are all elephant-shaped. In her study, there is a tattered out-of-print Andy Warhol Greenpeace poster of a pink elephant that Agrawal had bought as a student in London in the 1990s. Next to it is another pink elephant painting, an acrylic by Babu Xavier. Over 200 elephant prints and figurines now adorn various shelves in her home and office in brass, glass, ceramics, wood, silver, enamel, mud, paper, leather, clay, cloth, and even one fashioned out of a coconut. Most of those were bought during…

“If you want your team to excel in their jobs, they need coaching and mentoring,” says Vishakha R.M., CEO and MD of India First Life insurance. “It is about offering a holistic view, beyond the functional, and helping individuals realise their own potential benefits in overall development,” explains Vishakha, who guides thinkers and leaders through mentorship associations, including the International Insurance Society Mentor programme, WWB Leadership and Diversity for Innovation Programme and RGA Leaders for Tomorrow programme. So, does she take special interest in mentoring women to improve gender diversity? “I believe that to promote gender diversity, we need to mentor men to empower them to provide equal opportunities to women,” she says. She takes special interest in mentoring women, to prepare them for challenges in continuing their career and…

GDP Contracts by 7.5% in Q2 Real Gross Domestic Product (Y-o-Y, in %) Real Gross Domestic Product (₹lakh crore) Analysts Had Predicted a Worse Quarter GDP projections for Q2 FY21 Consumption, Investment Hit Growth in expenditure of GDP (at constant prices) in % Sectors Feel the Heat Too Sectoral growth (at constant prices) in % India vs the Rest GDP growth of key economies (Y-o-Y, in %)…

Ostensibly, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Industries, and the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, are engaged in a court battle over ownership of the ₹26,000 crore debt-laden Future Group. But at the core of the fight is the struggle for supremacy in the $850 billion (₹62.8 lakh crore) Indian retail industry. Having been pushed into a corner by Alibaba, not only in China but also in South East Asia, Amazon sees India as its only hope of achieving scale outside the US. Bezos is doing all he can to ensure that the opportunity to buy India’s second-largest retailer does not go out of his hand easily. But this isn’t a two-way fight. There’s a third, perhaps, even a fourth, player vying for leadership of what is projected to…

For years, Industrialists connected to leather industry in the "City of Taj" had to look to labs in Chennai or France-Germany for the testing of their products. Testing in outside labs not only took lots of time but the whole process also involved high costs. Under Uttar Pradesh Export infrasternal Development Project, the country's most advanced testing lab has been set up in Signa area on Mathura Highway, about 21 km from Agra. On August 7, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath dedicated to the State the modern facility that signals end of the industrialists' ordeal. "With the opening of this new lab at the doorsteps of Agra, it has become possible to detect the presence of any harmful chemical in the leather of a shoe as also to determine the strength…

Cancer Institute Built by the Yogi Government on a 77-acre plot at a cost of 805 crore in Lucknow's CG City, the 1250-bed cancer hospital, first super speciality Government cancer treatment facility in the country, makes all the difference between life and death for cancer patients. This institute has been set up with the assistance of and on the pattern of Mumbai's renowned Tata Memorial Hospital. Atal University Taking some extraordinary decisions in the field of medical education, the Yogi Government has established Atal Medical Univer Now all the medical colleges, nursing and paramedical colleges of the State will become part of this university with uniform syllabus and one academic calendar. MBBSSeats The National Medical Commission has allowed five new medical colleges of the State to take admission on 150-150…

The Department of Pharmaceuticals had gone into a huddle as early as February this year when India had only three confirmed cases of Covid-19. A committee of inter-ministerial experts and importers and manufacturers of medicines met every day to keep a watch on happenings in China. Their worry was not just the spread of the disease. They were also concerned about the lockdown in China and its impact on supply of key raw materials used to make medicines in India. Department officials later informed the parliamentary standing committee on chemicals and fertilisers chaired by Kanimozhi Karunanidhi on February 28 that their concern was that India was “unfortunately” dependent on China for 58 types of medicine raw materials — active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs or bulk drugs), key starting materials (KSM) and…

What is the biggest change that Covid has brought in the way you look at investing? How will you look at investing differently from here on? The thesis is still the same except, with Covid, digitisation and focus on online has accelerated in six months, which would have taken three years to happen. Two, we’re going in early because we’re acting smart, and three, we’re saying you’ve got to look at the balance between public markets and private markets. In previous two years, private markets gave better valuations than public markets to disruptive companies as public markets didn’t understand. With Covid, public markets have got to understand the power of Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba and Paypal, companies where the world has gone, how they’re going digital. The slow demise of old…